Overview
- Winter storm warnings cover New York City, Long Island, northeast New Jersey and southern Connecticut from late Friday to early Saturday, with peak snowfall rates of 1 to 2 inches per hour and localized totals topping 10 inches in heavier bands.
- An ice storm warning in western Pennsylvania calls for roughly 0.2 to 0.3 inches of ice, with forecasters warning of tree damage, power outages and nearly impossible travel in hardest-hit areas.
- Flight disruptions surged during peak holiday travel, with FlightAware reporting about 1,100 cancellations and more than 3,600 delays by midday, and New York’s three major airports among the most affected.
- City and state officials urged limited driving and use of mass transit, with New York City issuing a travel advisory and pre-deploying sanitation crews to pretreat roads and begin plowing once accumulations reach two inches.
- Nationwide alerts stretch from the Great Lakes to Western mountains, where high elevations in the Sierra and Lake Tahoe could see 1 to 3 feet of snow, and forecasters flag another system bringing rain along the I-95 corridor Sunday into Monday before a colder air surge; in the UK, WX Charts signals early-January Scottish snow remain speculative as the Met Office maintains a cautious outlook.